An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: On Monday, researchers from Japan’s Osaka University announced the successful completion of a first-of-its-kind heart transplant. Rather than replacing their patient’s entire heart with a new organ, these researchers placed degradable sheets containing heart muscle cells onto the heart’s damaged areas — and if the procedure has the desired effect, it could eventually eliminate the need for some entire heart transplants.

To grow the heart muscle cells, the team started with induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These are stem cells that researchers create by taking an adult’s cells — often from their skin or blood — and reprogramming them back into their embryonic-like pluripotent state. At that point, researchers can coax the iSP cells into becoming whatever kind of cell they’d like. In the case of this Japanese study, the researchers created heart muscle cells from the iSP cells before placing them on small sheets. The patient, which suffers from ischemic cardiomyopathy, will be monitored for the next year. If all goes well, the researchers hope to conduct the same procedure on nine other people suffering from the same condition within the next three years.

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Source: Slashdot – Lab-Grown Heart Muscles Have Been Transplanted Into a Human For the First Time

Facebook has agreed to pay $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) over its use of facial recognition technology in Illinois, “giving privacy groups a major victory that again raised questions about the social network’s data-mining practices,” reports The New York Times. From the report: The case stemmed from Facebook’s photo-labeling service, Tag Suggestions, which uses face-matching software to suggest the names of people in users’ photos. The suit said the Silicon Valley company violated an Illinois biometric privacy law by harvesting facial data for Tag Suggestions from the photos of millions of users in the state without their permission and without telling them how long the data would be kept. Facebook has said the allegations have no merit.
Under the agreement, Facebook will pay $550 million to eligible Illinois users and for the plaintiffs’ legal fees.

The sum dwarfs the $380.5 million that the Equifax credit reporting agency agreed this month to pay to settle a class-action case over a 2017 consumer data breach. Facebook disclosed the settlement as part of its quarterly financial results, in which it took a charge on the case. The sum amounted to a rounding error for Facebook, which reported that revenue rose 25 percent to $21 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with a year earlier, while profit increased 7 percent to $7.3 billion.

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Source: Slashdot – Facebook To Pay 0 Million To Settle Facial Recognition Suit

Iwastheone shares a report from MIT Technology Review: Astronomers have just released the highest-resolution image of the sun. Taken by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Maui, it gives us an unprecedented view of our nearest star and brings us closer to solving several long-standing mysteries. The new image demonstrates the telescope’s potential power. It shows off a surface that’s divided up into discrete, Texas-size cells, like cracked sections in the desert soil. You can see plasma oozing off the surface, rising into the air before sinking back into darker lanes.

“We have now seen the smallest details on the largest object in our solar system,” says Thomas Rimmele, the director of DKIST. The new image was taken December 10, when the telescope achieved first light. It is still technically under construction, with three more instruments set to come online. When formal observations begin in July, DKIST, with its 13-foot mirror, will be the most powerful solar telescope in the world. Located on Haleakala (the tallest summit on Maui), the telescope will be able to observe structures on the surface of the sun as small as 18.5 miles (30 kilometers). This resolution is over five times better than that of DKIST’s predecessor, the Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope in New Mexico.

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Source: Slashdot – Astronomers Capture the Highest-Resolution Photo of the Sun Ever Taken